Wednesday, November 16, 2016

When He Speaks Like This You Don’t Know What He’s After: Last Thoughts On Leonard Cohen, 1934-2016.

Leonard Cohen is dead.

He was one of those rare
songwriters—like Bob Dylan, like Neil Young, like Joni Mitchell—who has been
around so long we that we have long since taken him for granted; he keeps
active, keeps touring, keeps surprising us with new twists and turns to his
career.

But he was 82.

Older than Elvis would have been,
older than Jerry Lee Lewis is now. He is easily the biggest pop legend to have
begun his career at the most advanced age. In a music world of teenagers and
young prodigies, Leonard Cohen released his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, when he was all of 33 years old. If he was
Jesus, it was the year he would have been crucified.

On the first and most famous song
on the album, “Suzanne,” he addresses Jesus directly, walking across the water,
becoming certain only drowning men could see him, and saying that “all men will
be sailors then until the sea shall free them.” Cohen then describes Jesus as
“almost human.”

This was 1967. People were simply
not writing songs like this. Everything was about Sgt. Pepper’s band and Jimi
Hendrix’s various experiences, or, if you were lucky (or just hip), The Velvet
Underground’s postmodern menace. Only Bob Dylan was hiding out in the basement,
but by the end of the year, even he had hired Gordon Lightfoot’s band.

Leonard Cohen clearly borrowed
from Dylan—the deadpan voice and folk arrangements are unimaginable without Bob
paving the way—and yet he went beyond him. Where Dylan always wanted to be an
accomplished writer, Leonard Cohen already was; he was an accomplished novelist
before Songs was released. It would
be like if John Updike walked away from his books to become a country-rock
icon.

And like the greatest modern
songwriters, many of Leonard Cohen’s songs are best known by others who put
them across in bigger ways. Judy Collins’ “Suzanne” put him on the map, while
Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” remains the definitive reading of that beautiful,
fragile masterpiece.

And yet, for me, the deepest,
darkest, greatest song of all is “The Stranger Song.”

Like his finest work, it mixed
the sacred with the profane, the sacrament with the seediness. I’ve listened to
it countless times, yet I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. It’s about
love, mystery, mysticism, shelter, dealers, deceit, and fate, but I can’t even
figure out if it’s about two people, three people, or an entire parade of
people. Yet lines stick out that work despite their seeming pretentions: “He
was just some Joseph looking for a manger,” goes one part; “It’s hard to hold
the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender,” goes
another.

And then, at yet another part are
among the most fully-realized and sophisticated lyrics I’ve ever encountered in
a pop song:

And while he talks his dreams to sleep

You notice there’s a highway

That is curling up like smoke above his shoulder.

It sounds like a ghost story and
looks like a de Chirico painting.

I first got my copy of Songs when I worked in a used record
store; it was un-remastered and unremarkable looking, the way those original
Columbia CD issues were and I doubt I paid more than five bucks for it.

At the time I knew a girl who was
a poet and also appreciated the album. We would celebrate the macabre world it
conjured by improvising to each other in deadpan new Cohen “lyrics,” which
basically consisted of stringing together images of roads, sex, and New
Testament imagery. Like a Leonard Cohen song, she had a dark mysteriousness
about her, and a sexiness too.

Years later, I learned that she
tried to killed herself and was only saved when her boyfriend and father broke
down her door.

And yet, Leonard Cohen had long
since beaten me to the epiphany, sung as obvious as though he was a blind man reciting
a dog-eared hotel room Bible: “It is you my love, you who are the stranger.”

And this is just one line of one
song.

And Leonard Cohen wrote hundreds
of songs with thousands of lines.

And I can only imagine the scores
of places each one could take us, through his own vision as an artist and
through our own experiences as listeners.

And now that voice has been
silenced, and we pause to reflect, as we should.